The Luck of the Weissensteiners
In the sleepy town of Bratislava in 1933 a romantic girl falls for a bookseller from Berlin.
Greta Weissensteiner, daughter of a Jewish weaver, slowly settles in with the Winkelmeier clan just as the developments in Germany start to make waves in Europe and re-draw the visible and invisible borders. The political climate in the multifaceted cultural society of disintegrating Czechoslovakia becomes more complex and affects relations between the couple and the families. The story follows the group of characters throughout the war with its predictable and also its unexpected turns and events and the equally hard times after. What makes The Luck of the Weissensteiners so extraordinary is the chance to consider the many different people who were never in concentration camps, never in the military, yet who nonetheless had their own indelible Holocaust experiences. This is a wide-ranging exploration of the connections between social location, personal integrity and, as the title says, luck.
Sebastian
Sebastian is the story of a young man who has his leg amputated before World War I. When his father is drafted to the war it falls on to him to run the family grocery store in Vienna, to grow into his responsibilities, bear loss and uncertainty and hopefully find love.
Sebastian Schreiber, his extended family, their friends and the store employees experience the‘ golden days’ of pre-war Vienna and the timed of the war and the end of the Monarchy while trying to make a living and to preserve what they hold dear.